Quick and Dirty Home School Money Saving Hacks

This year we're starting a couple of new programs and curriculum that require quite a few accessories. Accessories that could have set me back approximately $30 more than I actually paid ($50, if I'd sprung for a real white board!)

Spelling

It started with "All About Spelling," a heavily manipulative-based system I am really hoping and praying will help my anxious, poor spellers. 

Being a naturally cheap frugal person, I balked when I checked a the publisher's site, an office supply store, and finally Amazon, only to find that a basic 3x5 card file box cost anywhere from $5 to $15 - Each! I'd just resigned myself to paying nearly $4/ea for a multi-pack on Amazon when, to my relief, they appeared before me on my second Dollar Tree supply run! 

This program also needs a magnetic white board for manipulating letter tiles. Portability is a major factor for us: I did not want to teach spelling in the common room, nor devote one of my giant white boards to the tiles. Again, enter Dollar Tree, but this time, head for the baking aisle and grab a small cookie sheet. Not only is it magnetic, but dry erase markers come off it just fine. Not perfectly - you're not going to end up using it for cookies - but it's enough for our purposes.

I have a suspicion that we will eventually run out of space in both the card box and on the tiny cookie sheet. But I'm not borrowing trouble yet. I don't think there will be real need to keep all the level 1 cards around for daily reference once we get to level 2. And if we need a bigger cookie sheet, they're only a few $ at a regular store. Or, we'll just use two! 

Bible

Another thing we're bringing some organization to this year is verse memory. We've done plenty of it in the past, but we've never tracked our progress or even maintained a master list of what we've learned. I'm not wasting too many tears on this, but I was ready for a little more formality this year. 

I'd heard good things about a card-file based memory and review system, and I tracked down the instructions here at SimplyCharlotteMason.com.

Like the spelling system, we needed 3x5 card files, already obtained at Dollar Tree. We also needed a Lot of tabbed dividers - 41 per kid, to be precise. Here's where I decided to make some modifications. You can get alphabet card dividers from Amazon as low as $5, but they would require extensive modification to work with the memory system.  The site referenced above has a nice printable set of customized dividers, but when I thought about how my hands - and my head - would feel after cutting out over 120 of the things, I balked.
I already knew we were going to be printing out our verses on regular-weight paper, cut a little smaller than 3x5 cards. This means regular cheap index cards will work fine as dividers. So I broke out my $1 pack of colored 3x5 cards and a pack of paper clips. I put the paper clips where the tabs would be, and simply labeled them by hand. It took about 1.5 episodes of my current TV show, and no hand-ache afterwords! 

Oh, I did make one more modification. I don't intend continue to build up the verses to review in the same box forever. I think we'll stay more sane if we just re-set them each school year. And we'll only be doing one verse (or brief set of verses) per week. So I decided to reduce the 31 day-of-the-month dividers to 15. I wrote 1,15 on the first, 2,16 on the second, etc. This still gives us 27 slots in our box in addition to the current week, meaning we won't ever have more than 2 verses per slot. I think we can handle that. And if it gets overwhelming, we will go ahead and cycle them out early. 

I'm also adding a few memory helps to our system. Each week, I will print a set of four cards for each kid. The first contains the entire text of the verse, with reference. The second contains the same verse, but about 50% of the words are blanked out except for their first letters. The third contains Only the first letter of each word and punctuation. The last has just blank lines for the verse to be hand-copied on. 

See a sample verse here 

The cards are arranged on the printout such that you can fold the whole verse and the first-letter-only copy back-to-back for storage in your file. When you are ready to move a memorized verse from the "Daily" practice slot, discard the hand written and partial-deletion copy, and place the first-letter-only version face out in the next slot.

We will also mark the card with date of initial memory, plus the date of formal review every quarter or so. 

Bonus: School Room Storage

BTW, here's how we organize (much of) the rest of our school stuff. 

Both the fabric boxes and the shelf unit are from Ikea (Kallax series, to be exact.) Total cost around $110.
Each kid has their own box. They keep their binders and current textbooks in there, a pencil and supply box, and any other work in progress. It's the equivalent of a grade-school desk or a middle-school locker - which means that plenty of trash ends up in there after a while too, but at least it's out of sight in my dining room!
I have my own box too, and there are a couple of extras. OK, there are also a couple of cubes that are collecting marginally organized detritus, but that happens to every other storage furniture I've ever owned.  And, in fact, this system is actually tried and true: we got it early in the '19-20 school year and it worked for us Far better than our previous organization attempts.